Writing about random topics

Expertise

A few years ago, I wanted to be a full time professional stock market speculator. If you go back through my post archives, especially in 2006 and the start of 2007, you will find a lot of posts on my thoughts on the market. I decided I couldn’t do it for two reasons:

I hadn’t lived through a bear market yet and didn’t know how I would react

I didn’t have enough trading capital.

I mention this because I recently picked up the book Enhancing Trader Performance. This is a book by Brett Steenbarger, who is a psychologist and trader. The book is an examination of what the characteristics are of top performers in their field. For example, many of us like to play sports like football or baseball, but not all of us are star athletes. What is the difference between the average folk and the elite performers? What makes them so different?

Steenbarger went and examined that and wrote a book about it. It relates to stock traders in particular but he also examines athletes such as Tiger Woods and Nolan Ryan. Clearly, these are athletes that are not only great, but exceptionally great. They are among the greatest in their respective fields.

So what makes great traders/athletes great? I’ve only read a bit of the book, but here are some things I have picked up:

Elite performers have a natural liking of what they do. To them, practice doesn’t seem like a chore, it is enjoyable.

Elite performers have a natural ability to do what they do. You can learn a skill, but elite performers gravitate towards the skills towards which they have a natural affinity.

Elite performers see things differently than the rest of us. For example, a rookie football receiver and an elite receiver would see the field in very different ways. A star receiver would recognize holes, see patterns and find ways to get open that a rookie could not. Star performers literally process information differently than the rest of us.

Because they process information differently, star performers can learn to do things in new ways that the rest of us don’t see. They can discern different patterns that an average or above-average performer wouldn’t. Their brains can come to different conclusions than other people do given the same set of data and this gives them an edge.

There’s tons more but this will do for a start. Given what I have learned from this book, what sorts of abilities do I have which I can be a star performer?

Ballroom dancing – I am competent at this but I am not a star performer. I don’t really have the desire or drive to put in the work required to really excel at this. To be sure, it’s fun and I do it a lot, and I enjoy it. But it’s not a natural ability of mine and my brain doesn’t process information quickly enough to see new moves in dancing while I am doing it.

Magic– As a magician, I would definitely say I am competent. I would not say I am an expert. Why? Because to me, practicing sometimes seems like work that I do not enjoy and I often find myself having to motivate myself to rehearse. There are periods of time when I do tons of practicing but there are also stretches when I do not.But I am not just competent. I can pick up tricks quickly, I can learn to see new uses for tricks and I am constantly trying to update myself. However, my delivery is not as naturally smooth as it could be and I don’t put in the effort necessary to be an elite performer. I’m simply above average.

Anti-spam researcher – I work in email security for a living, specifically, I fight spam. In this regards, I would absolutely consider myself an expert. This is particularly true when it comes to the data analysis portion of my job. I thrive on data. I write scripts all the time to gather data and parse it. I do this for fun. I constantly am looking at data and I constantly finding myself seeing new and different patterns in the data that others simply do not see.I find that I can process information differently. I can “see” things from end-to-end and quickly determine whether or not something will work, and I can often do it in less than five seconds. I have done this so much that I can see if a message is spam or not in less than two seconds. I can screen entire screens of email and easily pick up spam messages from normal messages. I can do all of this effortlessly because I really enjoy doing it. It doesn’t feel like work; to me, it’s fun. It’s a challenge and when it becomes too easy, I want to move onto the next challenge.

This exercise, examining myself, has been enjoyable. It explains why some people are elite performers and others are average, and it also explains why some people are better in fields than others. It’s because those are their natural skill sets and they are doing what they are “meant” to be doing.